Loads of trees!

[andyp7]

Yeh, 3gb switch, the pc I use is a 2.8ghz dual xeon with 2gb of ram.

[gafl]

Hi all,
I never tried so many instances and do not have time to test on 20000 trees.
But, here are 2 tests of proxies of trees created by Arboretum.

The first square has 90 trees, computed in medium mode in 800x600.
9 different trees from ARBORETUM.



The second is 9 instances of the smaller one then, there are 890 trees.


It took 25mn to compute the IrMap in 800x600 (medium mode) and
about the same for the render in 1024x768 on a small render farm of 4
computers.

More info on Arboretum:
http://glg86.chez-alice.fr/pages/arboretumpag.html

Bye !
Gael

[jow]

Andy, how many do you get to before it crashes?
How are you applying the trees, scatter, PF, by hand,...?

[Candelero]

Best when using proxies, would be considering the use of Dynamic memory limits, if with or without 3GB you are hitting the RAM edge.

Best regards,
nikki Candelero

[jow]

Nikki, is there a limit to how many proxies can be used?
excluding hardware, ram and stuff..

[Candelero]

Technically - NO.
It's more about when MAX and WIN are gonna crash.

Best regards,
nikki Candelero

[andyp7]

Andy, how many do you get to before it crashes?
How are you applying the trees, scatter, PF, by hand,...?

I get to about 20 instanced trees, each being 336,000 polys each, so about 7 million polygons. BUT one thing to note is that i do have other geometry in the scene (250,000 of buildings) but still, nothing compared to what you have. All placed by hand.

Maybe you could send me one of ur tree files and I will try duplicate it?

cheers

[CarlosBZ]

Any pros/cons between Vray/proxies vs 3dmax/xrefs?

[jow]

Cheers nikki, good to know.
Andy, i converted my trees to proxies then just instanced them using a scatter tool.
Ill PM you.

[DaForce]

Just remember that Vray Proxies will slow down your render ALOT. I found with tree renders it about doubles the render time.

So if you have the need for speed its best to avoid them. Buit if speed isnt as important as stopping the render from crashing because of high memory usage then yeah.. proxies are very very handy.

[CXStudios]

I'd have to disagree with you DaForce on the speed, using proxies for trees have been one of the biggest factors in the making of some deadlines. All my machines have 2GB and have yet to max out. 95% of my renderings contain over 2000 tree proxies, with about 35,000 polys each.

But this is just in my experience.

[DaForce]

Hmm well its common knowledge that proxies do not speed things up.. they are not meant to. They are meant to lower the memory usage during renders.

It simply HAS to be slower as it loads and unloads the geometry as it renders which takes time. Every test i have done with Proxies has been slower.

the only place i can see a speed improvement in using proxies is if without them there was HEAVY diskpaging.. due to running out of RAM but usually this just causes max/vray to crash. Then using proxies will help lower the memory usage and allow you to continue rendering without problems. So that in a sense is time saving.

[DaForce]

Just whipped up a little test. To help backup my thoughts.
I initially had it rendering with IR/LC but the LC bogged right down on the proxy renders. So switched back to IR/QMC

All mesh trees 7m 28.2s


One single big proxy 32m 11.5s


A seperate proxy for each tree 27m 47.5s

[vlado]

Any pros/cons between Vray/proxies vs 3dmax/xrefs?

XRefs do not save any memory when rendering, as V-Ray still has to load all that geometry at the same time. However, that may be faster to render.

As for speed, proxies certainly render slower than normal geometry. In many cases though, there is simply no other way to render the scene, if it contains many millions of polygons. Also, in recent versions, proxies render somewhat faster.

Even with 64-bit machines, proxies have their place, as really heavy scenes may require more RAM than there is physically present, thus causing Windows to page parts of the memory to disk. In that case, proxies may be faster.

Best regards,
Vlado

[DaForce]

Thanks for backing up what I said about proxies and slowness Vlado